A pretty damn high percentage of the 'total workforce', I'm sure. HR? Yeah, it's not like every company doesn't have an army of these workers.
99% of the computer work HR employees do is two things: 1) Emailing 2) Editing.doc files. There is no need for proprietary software for either of those tasks.
Healthcare? It's one of the biggest industries in the US (and growing).
And healthcare traditionally lags other industries in picking up new trends. The trend across all industries is increasing adoption of open source software. What does that tell you about healthcare?
(Almost) everyone has a lawyer, and every county has a courthouse (complete with its own paid lawyers, judges, etc.) which need to track cases.
The ratio of lawyers to general population is low, fortunately. And frankly, I hope they stick with Windows for a very long time, they deserve it if anyone does.
Retail (surely you've heard the term, 'service industry'?) is the gross bulk of the US economy at this point. Maybe some chains use "open source" as part of the systems, but the end result surely isn't shared wholesale with their competitors. (Please realize this includes food service.)
Linux owns 10% of point of sale industry and is growing steadily.
I wager I accounted for at least 50-60% of the total workforce.
Your argument is bogus from beginning to end. The thread is about people who must have proprietary software to do their work. You and other others are merely harping on about people who are using proprietary software now, regardless of any real need. And you are glossing over the very obvious fact that the trend is away from proprietary software.
That's an exception, not the rule. Google provides a service with software. So much so that it only made sense to start working in-house with its own platform. They've become so proficient, they're now competing with Apple and Microsoft on multiple fronts.
This has nothing to do with online apps. We are talking about the desktops and laptops Googlers use. For the most part, Googlers do things like browsing and word processing exactly the same as we mere mortals. I should know.
The difference is, now they do it on Macs and Linux while Windows was made to vanish by decree. It wasn't hard as some like to pretend.
1. Fortune 500+ companies will want something (or someone) to point the finger at when shit goes wrong...
2. Momentum. You don't just start replacing software overnight as testing, policies, and procedural changes most likely will need to take place...
Both of your arguments are falsified by the fact that Google did in fact replace nearly all their proprietary Windows software overnight. A few Windows machines are still allowed but they are treated like the dangerous virus magnets they are and it requires director level authorization to get one.
Dude, you're an idiot. Sorry to have to break that to you, but it's true. Your "I don't need any commercial software; why should you?" argument is so head-up-your-ass myopic that I can actually make that diagnosis from here, without an office visit.
Your argument is pure rhetoric. The fact is that today most computer users, in business or at home, can function perfectly well without proprietary software. They will be safer and richer as a result. But many people don't know that, in part because of a noisy segment of the community promulgating falsehoods like yours. I will not speculate on the motivation for this, it should be pretty obvious.
The licensing costs end up being the key issue in companies of any size.
Let me see, the licensing costs for all software I use at work is, um, $zero. And the licensing costs for all software I use at home with the exception of games is, um, also $zero. And I use a lot of different kinds of software. That's because everything I need is available for free on Linux, at home and at work. If that is not the case for you well you have my sympathy or maybe it's just your own darn fault.
Apple, Microsoft & Google have got to be getting sick of this - they need to open up their wallets and toss some serious money towards lobbyists to get the patent system changed.
The competing idea, and one very attractive to corporate bean counters, is that they can maintain profitable patent cartels between themselves. After all, this has worked well in the past, to the detriment of the consumer. What has changed is simply the commoditization of evil: now anybody with a laptop and $5 in the bank can equip themselves with bogus patents and go hunting. Oops, now the system has to change. But perhaps the corporate bean counters do not have in mind changes that would benefit society in general. For example, they may be attracted by the idea of making it harder for patent holders to succeed in court if they are not part of a patent cartel.
Argument by analogy is a logical fallacy. That said, going to IPv6 is not like replacing a road with a bigger one, it is more like replacing all the roads in the country with railways.
Whatever the heck ChromeOS is (never heard of it), I can tell you one thing for sure: this guy Paul Buchheit might be right, but he sounds more like he has an axe to grind with the ChromeOS team than anything else.
Adding driver versions to system requirements would be ridiculous. Needs Nvidia Driver Version X on Nvidia Card Version Y?
It's an unspoken reality and not just on Linux. Over time the situation improves. It certainly has for me. By the way, I use ATI/AMD with open source drivers. A few rough spots but rapidly improving. With NVidia's proprietary driver I sometimes get the feeling they implement OpenGL features without reading the spec, but just make them work for the usage in a bunch of programs they test against. For example, I have to load mipmap levels in a particular order for NVidia, no such restriction with ATI running the open source driver.
3D graphics and shaders would be highly compatible in *nix? Have you ever tried porting even a trivial 3d application that makes use of advanced features and seen it halting to a crawl or nor working properly on the right hardware because driver support was a mess? I have (gamedev here), and it's not pretty.
Yes I have, and yes I have (veteran 3D hacker here). I pointed out that every flavor of Unix gets its 3D libraries and drivers from the same source so Linux flavour is not the issue. Hardware, driver and library version is the issue, and how is that different from Windows?
Admirable, but a browser is still this far behind from today's game complexity that it would be like comparing Emacs to Halo.
Ok, ok, car analogy... hmmm a course bicycle to a Ferrari?
That is entirely incorrect. A browser makes heavy demands of its host operating system including audio and video. About the only thing browsers don't do much is 3D graphics. Backing away from the browser example, 3D graphics is highly compatible across Linux systems because it is entirely based on freedesktop/Mesa.
Was it ever a good idea for Apache to participate in Java in the first place, knowing that the exact situation that they are complaining about today existed when they started, and has existed for the entire time they've been developing?
Yes it was, it forestalled Microsoft's evil designs. Now that Microsoft's power is largely broken it is time to break the power of those trolls who would attempt to collect toll on Java the language. It is time for the open source community to make a clean break with Java the platform. It always was and still is a crappy platform anyway. Java the language isn't that bad.
Yeah, if only Google had thought about this issue and invested some effort into enabling off-line web applications before deploying an everything-is-done-through-the-browser OS. Maybe, while they were at it, they might have noticed the performance issues common to web apps and worked on improving JavaScript performance to deal with that, and provide some way to run native code through the browser to cover the cases where simply making JavaScript run faster wasn't enough.
And maybe while they were at it they would have noticed that browser interfaces suck for many applications, that not everybody wants a gratuitous extra layer of GUI around their app, and browser apps generally do things slower than native apps even when accelerated with shiny new Javacode engines.
Understanding the significance of ChromeOS requires that you abandon some old ways of thinking about how a computer should act.
So, my "old way of thinking" is that a computer is a universal machine, capable of doing whatever I want it to. Now I am supposed to abandon that in favor of a single purpose machine that does exactly one thing, run a web browser? Thanks, but I prefer my old way of thinking.
For me, the significance of ChromeOS is much simpler: out of control hubris at the Googleplex.
Google may be doing Jobs's path though. First only allowing Web apps and getting that locked down, then eventually adding an App Store, and a mechanism for apps to run securely.
Not exactly. Google cares about exactly one thing: that every phone should be able to run a browser that can freely access Google's web sites, without any tollbooths on the way.
Android is gaining on iPhone, but not on iPod touch, and it's all Google's fault. Google reportedly requires all devices that can access Android Market to have a camera, GPS, and other things more suited for a telephone than a PDA, leaving the pure-PDA market to Apple.
What? Those are all things I want in a "pure PDA". The reason Android isn't gaining on iPad (I *think* that's what you really meant) is that there aren't very many tablet products released yet. On the other hand, Samsung quickly sold over a million Android tablets. I would call that gaining.
Slashdot Mirror
A pretty damn high percentage of the 'total workforce', I'm sure. HR? Yeah, it's not like every company doesn't have an army of these workers.
99% of the computer work HR employees do is two things: 1) Emailing 2) Editing .doc files. There is no need for proprietary software for either of those tasks.
Healthcare? It's one of the biggest industries in the US (and growing).
And healthcare traditionally lags other industries in picking up new trends. The trend across all industries is increasing adoption of open source software. What does that tell you about healthcare?
(Almost) everyone has a lawyer, and every county has a courthouse (complete with its own paid lawyers, judges, etc.) which need to track cases.
The ratio of lawyers to general population is low, fortunately. And frankly, I hope they stick with Windows for a very long time, they deserve it if anyone does.
Retail (surely you've heard the term, 'service industry'?) is the gross bulk of the US economy at this point. Maybe some chains use "open source" as part of the systems, but the end result surely isn't shared wholesale with their competitors. (Please realize this includes food service.)
Linux owns 10% of point of sale industry and is growing steadily.
I wager I accounted for at least 50-60% of the total workforce.
Your argument is bogus from beginning to end. The thread is about people who must have proprietary software to do their work. You and other others are merely harping on about people who are using proprietary software now, regardless of any real need. And you are glossing over the very obvious fact that the trend is away from proprietary software.
That's an exception, not the rule. Google provides a service with software. So much so that it only made sense to start working in-house with its own platform. They've become so proficient, they're now competing with Apple and Microsoft on multiple fronts.
This has nothing to do with online apps. We are talking about the desktops and laptops Googlers use. For the most part, Googlers do things like browsing and word processing exactly the same as we mere mortals. I should know.
The difference is, now they do it on Macs and Linux while Windows was made to vanish by decree. It wasn't hard as some like to pretend.
He didn't say the list was exhaustive.
And also not meaningful because each entry in it is either wrong or applies to a tiny fraction of total computer users.
1. Fortune 500+ companies will want something (or someone) to point the finger at when shit goes wrong...
2. Momentum. You don't just start replacing software overnight as testing, policies, and procedural changes most likely will need to take place...
Both of your arguments are falsified by the fact that Google did in fact replace nearly all their proprietary Windows software overnight. A few Windows machines are still allowed but they are treated like the dangerous virus magnets they are and it requires director level authorization to get one.
Dude, you're an idiot. Sorry to have to break that to you, but it's true. Your "I don't need any commercial software; why should you?" argument is so head-up-your-ass myopic that I can actually make that diagnosis from here, without an office visit.
Your argument is pure rhetoric. The fact is that today most computer users, in business or at home, can function perfectly well without proprietary software. They will be safer and richer as a result. But many people don't know that, in part because of a noisy segment of the community promulgating falsehoods like yours. I will not speculate on the motivation for this, it should be pretty obvious.
And what percentage of the total workforce did you account for with your little list? Right.
And by the way, you apparently haven't heard of salesforce.com.
We can't even get our people off of windows desktops, what makes you think we can get them onto Ubunto at the same time as we go thin client?
Neither could Google until one day their windows machines got hacked by the Chinese government then oh wait they could.
The licensing costs end up being the key issue in companies of any size.
Let me see, the licensing costs for all software I use at work is, um, $zero. And the licensing costs for all software I use at home with the exception of games is, um, also $zero. And I use a lot of different kinds of software. That's because everything I need is available for free on Linux, at home and at work. If that is not the case for you well you have my sympathy or maybe it's just your own darn fault.
Apple, Microsoft & Google have got to be getting sick of this - they need to open up their wallets and toss some serious money towards lobbyists to get the patent system changed.
The competing idea, and one very attractive to corporate bean counters, is that they can maintain profitable patent cartels between themselves. After all, this has worked well in the past, to the detriment of the consumer. What has changed is simply the commoditization of evil: now anybody with a laptop and $5 in the bank can equip themselves with bogus patents and go hunting. Oops, now the system has to change. But perhaps the corporate bean counters do not have in mind changes that would benefit society in general. For example, they may be attracted by the idea of making it harder for patent holders to succeed in court if they are not part of a patent cartel.
big corps are being targeted by other patent trolls.
Argument by analogy is a logical fallacy. That said, going to IPv6 is not like replacing a road with a bigger one, it is more like replacing all the roads in the country with railways.
Given how hard this transition is, would it be better to go directly to IPv8 or some kind of variable-length scheme?
Oh, absolutely, we just just skip IPv6 and go straight to XML addresses.
We just want you to love us.
Oh yeah, and Paul Buchheit has left Google. You could say "the don't be evil has left the building".
Whatever the heck ChromeOS is (never heard of it), I can tell you one thing for sure: this guy Paul Buchheit might be right, but he sounds more like he has an axe to grind with the ChromeOS team than anything else.
Paul Buchheit is the originator of Don't Be Evil.
Read into that what you will.
Adding driver versions to system requirements would be ridiculous. Needs Nvidia Driver Version X on Nvidia Card Version Y?
It's an unspoken reality and not just on Linux. Over time the situation improves. It certainly has for me. By the way, I use ATI/AMD with open source drivers. A few rough spots but rapidly improving. With NVidia's proprietary driver I sometimes get the feeling they implement OpenGL features without reading the spec, but just make them work for the usage in a bunch of programs they test against. For example, I have to load mipmap levels in a particular order for NVidia, no such restriction with ATI running the open source driver.
3D graphics and shaders would be highly compatible in *nix? Have you ever tried porting even a trivial 3d application that makes use of advanced features and seen it halting to a crawl or nor working properly on the right hardware because driver support was a mess? I have (gamedev here), and it's not pretty.
Yes I have, and yes I have (veteran 3D hacker here). I pointed out that every flavor of Unix gets its 3D libraries and drivers from the same source so Linux flavour is not the issue. Hardware, driver and library version is the issue, and how is that different from Windows?
Admirable, but a browser is still this far behind from today's game complexity that it would be like comparing Emacs to Halo.
Ok, ok, car analogy... hmmm a course bicycle to a Ferrari?
That is entirely incorrect. A browser makes heavy demands of its host operating system including audio and video. About the only thing browsers don't do much is 3D graphics. Backing away from the browser example, 3D graphics is highly compatible across Linux systems because it is entirely based on freedesktop/Mesa.
with how many distros are out there, the QA departments of game companies would have to be beefed up like crazy.
Which is why a company like Opera has no chance whatsoever of being able to distribute a browser in binary from for Linux. Oh, wait...
Was it ever a good idea for Apache to participate in Java in the first place, knowing that the exact situation that they are complaining about today existed when they started, and has existed for the entire time they've been developing?
Yes it was, it forestalled Microsoft's evil designs. Now that Microsoft's power is largely broken it is time to break the power of those trolls who would attempt to collect toll on Java the language. It is time for the open source community to make a clean break with Java the platform. It always was and still is a crappy platform anyway. Java the language isn't that bad.
And maybe while they were at it they would have noticed that browser interfaces suck for many applications, that not everybody wants a gratuitous extra layer of GUI around their app, and browser apps generally do things slower than native apps even when accelerated with shiny new Javacode engines.
Understanding the significance of ChromeOS requires that you abandon some old ways of thinking about how a computer should act.
So, my "old way of thinking" is that a computer is a universal machine, capable of doing whatever I want it to. Now I am supposed to abandon that in favor of a single purpose machine that does exactly one thing, run a web browser? Thanks, but I prefer my old way of thinking.
For me, the significance of ChromeOS is much simpler: out of control hubris at the Googleplex.
Google may be doing Jobs's path though. First only allowing Web apps and getting that locked down, then eventually adding an App Store, and a mechanism for apps to run securely.
Not exactly. Google cares about exactly one thing: that every phone should be able to run a browser that can freely access Google's web sites, without any tollbooths on the way.
Android is gaining on iPhone, but not on iPod touch, and it's all Google's fault. Google reportedly requires all devices that can access Android Market to have a camera, GPS, and other things more suited for a telephone than a PDA, leaving the pure-PDA market to Apple.
What? Those are all things I want in a "pure PDA". The reason Android isn't gaining on iPad (I *think* that's what you really meant) is that there aren't very many tablet products released yet. On the other hand, Samsung quickly sold over a million Android tablets. I would call that gaining.
No no no, this is Slashdot.
When Steve Jobs says "HTML5 web apps are all you need," it's naked, leering, monopolistic evil.
When Google VP Sundar Pichai says the same thing, it's for your own good, and the most sensible advance in computing since the GUI was invented.
Please don't speak for me. As far as I am concerned, when somebody says something idiotic, they are an idiot whether they work for Apple or Google.